Maybe the Pre will be the one I hold onto for awhile.
Time was I enjoyed building my own machines and tinkering with
them as new ideas and capabilities came along. I'm getting out of that
mode, sort of.
I moved to the Treo600 because I'd long wanted a phone/PDA.
Then came the 650 with Bluetooth. Gone was the wired earbud.
Then the 680, that was really nice but ... the apps I had learned
to love just wouldn't behave together on the 680. What I really wanted
was something closer to multi-tasking, that I wasn't all the time
rebooting to get back my resources.
Treo Pro was Windows. Silly me, I thought that would mean having
in my hand what was on my PC, at least sort of. Turned out sort of
wasn't close enough, especially with the aggravation regularly involved
in ActiveSync.
Came the Pre. It's been out close to a year, and people who have
it love it, now me included. Even with its shortcomings, but one thing
I've long wanted was ability to upgrade the OS. The Pre's got it.
Add in - and if not for this point, I'd still have the T-Pro, with
which I'd come to a sort of detente - Spring coverage has improved
amazingly, and they were going to charge me significantly less than I
was paying AT&T for what I really needed.
I keep a spreadsheet of our four-line family usage, and AT&T's
attitude was if I could find something better, go there - so I did.
But the big market change - the one with which I started this thread,
was that back in the day, there were no promises. Everyone was a geek
and vendors didn't make (at least as many) promises they knew they
couldn't keep. I've long been impressed with knowing more than the sales
folk about what I was trying to buy, but most of them at least tried to
stay with the conversation. Computer sellers tended to be at least
marginally interested in computers.
That's changed, and not just with smartphones. Sales Associates
are just that: SALES Associates. Most of them no longer even pretend to
know what they are selling.
Manufacturers lead you to believe the thing they're selling will
do stuff, and when you get it, you find it won't. You call customer
support and wade into a menu, beginning with "Listen carefully as our
menu options have changed," to "Your call is important to us, but we are
experiencing higher than normal call volume," to "Live support is not
available. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Thing is, I'm already "old school." I'm in a shrinking population
of customers who think we shouldn't be treated that way, and can
remember when we weren't.
Rant off. (I like that, whoever used it first.)
I'm going to the local ski slope to get some video of Wounded
Warriors doing what most of us can still take for granted, or at least
legitimately imagine taking for granted. Video'll be online this
evening. Might even shoot a little with the Pre.
On 2/27/2010 11:10 AM, Harold M. Goldner wrote:
>
>
> I am so there; could not have said it better myself.
